A Speculation in "Goodbye Language"

Lura 2022-01-27 08:19:53

Godard's movie is really ugly. It takes a lot of patience to be able to watch the movie by itself, and even after watching it, I don’t know what I want to say. It's really dumbfounded.

The following is my guess.

From a dog's point of view, human language may sound like we hear the lines of characters in movies, without "meaning". The "meaningless" here refers to meaninglessness in the current context. In "Goodbye Language", the context of the images and the lines and subtitles are not right. The lines and subtitles are here as a separate existence, rather than a subsidiary of the video, to express the author's thoughts. Maybe you can just pick it up, look up his quotations, and add context to better understand it.

The reason for the incomprehension is that it is difficult for people to understand language without context. Therefore, to some extent, this is also the source of the deviation in communication between people. We don’t understand the author’s citations, what the author has experienced, and the books that we read. How can the audience or "reader" understand what the author wants to express?

So "Goodbye Language" can be seen as a goodbye to traditional language, and instead use audiovisual language and images to express one's own thoughts (but to be honest, it is even more difficult to understand. Maybe people in the future will be baptized by a lot of images. Can you communicate in this way).

However, setting aside more discussions about the author's thoughts, there is still something to learn from the film itself. As a pioneer movie, "Goodbye Language" has made many attempts on sound and picture, such as sudden sound disappearance, distorted picture, 3d and other attempts as a new audiovisual language.

Take editing as an example. There is a clip (about 25 minutes) that cross-edits the dog and the train. First of all, the big one is the cross of the two elements of the dog and the train entering the station. In the dog, there is the cross of the dog in the day and the dog at night, and the cross of the turning head and the non-turning head in the night dog. When the train enters the station, different treatments such as repetition, distortion, jumping, and freezing are used for the picture. Finally, the picture synthesis of the dog and the train is carried out. The short 1-minute clip contains new picture effects, new sound processing methods, and multiple cross-cutting. If you internalize it and use it appropriately in your own work, it will be a big gain.

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